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Edited by Shaun Gallagher

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Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of the Self is an interdisciplinary collection of articles that address questions across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, and neuroscience. Research on the topic of self has increased significantly in recent years in all of these areas. In philosophy and some areas of cognitive science, the emphasis on embodied cognition has fostered a renewed interest in rethinking personal identity, mind-body dualism, and overly Cartesian conceptions of self. Poststructuralist deconstructions of traditional metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity have led to debates about whether there are any grounds (moral if not metaphysical) for reconstructing the notion of self. Questions about whether selves actually exist or have an illusory status have been raised from perspectives as diverse as neuroscience, Buddhism, and narrative theory. With respect to self-agency, similar questions arise in experimental psychology. In addition, advances in developmental psychology have pushed to the forefront questions about the ontogenetic origin of self-experience, while studies of psychopathology suggest that concepts like self and agency are central to explaining important aspects of pathological experience. These and other issues motivate questions about how we understand, not only the self, but also how we understand ourselves in social and cultural contexts.

Bibliographic Information

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Print Publication Date:

Feb 2011

ISBN:

9780199548019

Published online:

May 2011

Current Online Version:

May 2011

DOI:

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548019.001.0001

Editor

Shaun Gallagher,editor
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Research Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005) and, with Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind (2008), and is editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011).

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